15.00-16.00 Matias Nurminen (COMS, University of Tampere): Longing for the Men of Past: The Manosphere, Resisting Reading and Rewriting Masculinity

Puhujien abstraktit alla:

Vierailijaprofessori Rebecca Coleman

Mediated Presents: Digital Media, Infra-Structures of Feeling and the Production of ‘the Now’

Digital media are now central to capitalist space-times, and are frequently described as producing a ‘real-time’, ‘live’, ‘always-on’ temporality. While seemingly referring to similar processes and experiences, these descriptions indicate a temporality that is diverse, multiple and changing. This paper addresses this temporality in terms of the present; a temporality that is both ‘now’ and on-going. It sets out one framework for conceptualising the temporal qualities of digital media, drawing on Raymond Williams’ influential work on structures of feeling and the (pre-)emergent qualities of media culture. Taking up feminist account of affect (e.g. Clough et al 2015, Berlant 2011, Paasonen et al 2015), I develop Williams’ notion of structures of feeling to offer the concept of infra-structures of feeling, to account for the amplified significance of pre-emergence, its affects and how digital media work across each other in complex architectures of texts, textures, platforms and devices. Fleshing out this concept, I analyse the presents produced by two popular digital media platforms: Twitter and Netflix. While these media produce the present differently, in both pre-emergence is central. The paper therefore concludes by inquiring into whether pre-emergence may define today’s structure of feeling and, if so, what this suggests for the affective qualities of contemporary capitalism.

Despite diversification of intimate relationships and women friendly social policies in Finland, gendered conventions still seem to organize heterosexual relationships and maintain inequalities. In this presentation, I discuss two kinds of progression narratives that emerge in interviews with mid- to later-life Finnish women as they reflect upon heterosexual relationships. The first progression narrative depicts social-cultural changes towards more diversity in relationships and less financial or social incentive for women to be married or live in a relationship. The second progressive narrative portrays changes in women’s own relationships experiences. In this narrative, subjectivity that builds on integrity, emerges and becomes established along relationship experiences through life course. The trajectory from dependent into solid subjectivity is saturated with men’s control over women’s sexuality, their work and leisure time and also, with women prioritizing men’s desires and needs over their own. While these two kinds of progression narratives partly overlap, they mostly run parallel to each other in women’s narration and I explore the affective politics of the progression narratives. As women reflect upon power and inequalities through progression narratives, I ask, how do they enable politicizing the personal on one hand and prevent it on the other.

The study is part of Academy of Finland funded research project (2015-2019) Just the Two of Us? Affective inequalities in intimate relationships (287983): http://affective-inequalities.fi/en/

Väitöskirjatutkija Matias Nurminen

Longing for the Men of Past: The Manosphere, Resisting Reading and Rewriting Masculinity

The paper examines the recent phenomenon of radical masculinity, or the manosphere, which has been studied in academia only scarcely. The manosphere is a diverse collection of mostly online communities and movements that promote for example self-improvement, seduction and dating tips, but also on the flip side misogyny, racism and antifeminism. The radical movements, like neomasculinity and Men Going Their Own Way, seem to share a special interest in storytelling and using narratives to their advantage as tools: Nurminen proposes that the radical manosphere communities appropriate narratives to recruit new members and that they tell reminiscing counter-narratives about their conceptions of masculinity.

Nurminen analyses the manosphere’s use of narratives from two interrelating aspects: From an intertextual perspective, he contrasts their strategies to the feminist literary theory of resisting reader (Fetterley 1978). The manosphere groups attempt to read popular narratives from masculinity’s point of view to justify their misogynistic worldview. From the perspective of master narratives and counter-narratives (Bamberg & Andrews 2004), the manosphere utilizes and re-utilizes narratives to build counter-narratives against the status quo in the western world. Nurminen claims that the manosphere seeks to reclaim through counter-narratives the lost master narrative of the uncontested male orientation in western society.